(.net) technology and society

September 27, 2006

Web 2.0 Consumer Technology Hits the Enterprise

The theme of consumer technology reaching the enterprise has been recurrent of late. There are two factors that appear to be driving this. From an IT perspective, these technologies have become more stable and reliable. From an HR perspective, enterprises are now swelling their ranks with next-generation of users that are accustomed to social networking and other Web 2.0-class technical capabilities. Here at DEMOfall, several vendors launched business applications that are based on popular consumer services.

Wiki-based collaboration

MindTouch. The company's dekiBox is a
plug-and-play wiki appliance for businesses. The software is sold as a
service on top of the original hardware device purchase. Competes with Socialtext and Jotspot.(Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Socialtext.)
It will be interesting to see if businesses find value in wiki
appliances - appliances have proved successful in the past as a means
to introducing new or complicated technologies into the enterprise -
network management, storage, e-mail, etc. were often first introduced
via an appliance. The company thinks they've found the secret sauce, as
they are already creating a new wiki every five seconds.

Serebrum.Axon is the company's
AJAX-based, WYSIWYG wiki environment for businesses. Content updates
are made in a central repository, and information is published across
multiple channels - you can see content updates in a Blackberry, on a PC, etc.

For sales and marketing users

BuzzLogic. This is
an
incredibly interesting service launch for someone who likes data
visualization and flow analysis. The company posed a simple question to
marketers: How do you know what's being
said about you in the blogosphere? BuzzLogic maintains a 'conversation
index' and has an analytic tool called the 'influence engine.' For
example, when the Chumby was released at Foo Camp,
who talked about it? What were the various threads of conversation?
Where did they intersect? What nodes (or which bloggers) wielded the
most influence on the dialogue? This is
being targeted at marketers who would like to measure and engage with
social media, and there are 50 companies in the beta.

Genius.com. On the face of it,
SalesGenius is an alternative to salesforce.com for sales pipeline
management. The difference lies in the capacity for direct-to-customer interactions. The demo included an IM
application for chatting with sales prospects,
and features that allowed salespeople to customize web
marketing materials or special offers, and analytics for individual Web
visits.

General-purpose business apps

Koral claims better,
more efficient
document sharing. More specifically, they want to bring the
sophisticated consumer sharing
of photos, text, etc. to business files. Users tag
files (as they would tag a blog post),
the system indexes the tags, and the files are then searchable by tag.
Koral also creates a tag cloud for files in the system, and shows
previews of the search results. Users can choose to receive automatic
updates when files change, either via RSS or e-mail. You could also
subscribe to various authors in the system -
e.g., another Omidyar Network staffer could subscribe to all of my IRR
calculations. Document push is also an option; updated versions of a
file (or an update alert) can be sent to the desktops of other users,
even if they didn't log in or subscribe to that document. Free for
basic usage, though the limitations of 'basic' were not defined. As
someone who iterates endlessly with changing teams, this looks amazing
for collaboration and version control.

System One. This
enterprise search engine refines results in real time as you type in
text. e.g., type in 'Christine' and
your number-one result will be the iMDB page for a killer car; continue
typing in 'mashup hacks' and you'll get pointed to my blog post on the
subject. The user's dashboard maintains an individual
history so that your dekstop search 'learns' about your preferences.
The
product sits within a wiki workspace environment and is targeted at
enterprises and researchers, but it seems from the demo that this
would be useful for any search user. The only thing that would make me
hesitate as an individual user is the US government's threatening
interest in acquiring search records - the tradeoff between increased
relevance and privacy is a tough one.

ThinkFree.ThinkFree AJAX Edition
is an online alternative to Microsoft Office. ThinkFree does also
provide round-trip data exchange with Office documents, which would be
essential to any adoption whatsoever. The compatibility looked
acceptable in the demo. The company must be tough as a bubble survivor,
but they've chosen a hard row to hoe.

PostPath is a Linux-based
e-mail and
collaboration system compatible with native Microsoft Exchange network
protocols. In
the demo, PostPath showed that creating PostPath users was identical to
setting up Exchange users. Looking at an Outlook desktop, you couldn't
tell that it was connected to a PostPath server and not to Exchange.
PostPath also made it look easy to ensure high availability.
Doing a hard power-off on their primary server resulted in Outlook
failing over to the secondary server and automatically reconnecting.
Even better, the user
didn't have to exit Outlook or do any reconfiguration. Most e-mail
vendors don't have compatibility with Exchange, so the company may have
addressed a key hurdle to adoption of this open solution.

Final note: As an all-purpose business user and former marketer, I'd
personally consider using BuzzLogic and Koral, though the general trend
towards more user-friendly functionality is a good one across the board.

Comments

Web 2.0 Consumer Technology Hits the Enterprise

The theme of consumer technology reaching the enterprise has been recurrent of late. There are two factors that appear to be driving this. From an IT perspective, these technologies have become more stable and reliable. From an HR perspective, enterprises are now swelling their ranks with next-generation of users that are accustomed to social networking and other Web 2.0-class technical capabilities. Here at DEMOfall, several vendors launched business applications that are based on popular consumer services.